Quantum neural network (QNN) is one of the promising areas in which noisy medium-scale quantum devices (MCD) can find advantageous applications in the short term compared to classical resources. Recurrent neural networks are the most fundamental networks for sequential learning, but there is still no canonical model of a quantum recurrent neural network (QRNN), which certainly limits research in the field of quantum deep learning. In the present paper, a new type of QRNS is proposed that would be a good candidate as a canonical QRNN model, where quantum recurrent blocks (QRB) are built in a hardware-efficient way, and QRNN are constructed by stacking QRB in a checkerboard pattern, which can significantly reduce the algorithm’s requirements with respect to coherent time of quantum devices. That is, QRNN is much more accessible on MCD devices. Numerical experiments show that our QRNN provides much better performance in prediction (classification) accuracy compared to classical RNN and state-of-the-art QNN models for sequential training and can predict changing details of time series data.
Quantum neural network (QNN) is one of the promising areas in which noisy medium-scale quantum devices (MCD) can find advantageous applications in the short term compared to classical resources. Recurrent neural networks are the most fundamental networks for sequential learning, but there is still no canonical model of a quantum recurrent neural network (QRNN), which certainly limits research in the field of quantum deep learning. In the present paper, a new type of QRNS is proposed that would be a good candidate as a canonical QRNN model, where quantum recurrent blocks (QRB) are built in a hardware-efficient way, and QRNN are constructed by stacking QRB in a checkerboard pattern, which can significantly reduce the algorithm’s requirements with respect to coherent time of quantum devices. That is, QRNN is much more accessible on MCD devices. Numerical experiments show that our QRNN provides much better performance in prediction (classification) accuracy compared to classical RNN and state-of-the-art QNN models for sequential training and can predict changing details of time series data.
Quantum neural network (QNN) is one of the promising directions where the near-term noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices could find advantageous applications against classical resources. Recurrent neural networks are the most fundamental networks for sequential learning, but up to now there is still a lack of canonical model of quantum recurrent neural network (QRNN), which certainly restricts the research in the field of quantum deep learning. In the present work, we propose a new kind of QRNN which would be a good candidate as the canonical QRNN model, where, the quantum recurrent blocks (QRBs) are constructed in the hardware-efficient way, and the QRNN is built by stacking the QRBs in a staggered way that can greatly reduce the algorithm's requirement with regard to the coherent time of quantum devices. That is, our QRNN is much more accessible on NISQ devices. Furthermore, the performance of the present QRNN model is verified concretely using three different kinds of classical sequential data, i.e., meteorological indicators, stock price, and text categorization. The numerical experiments show that our QRNN achieves much better performance in prediction (classification) accuracy against the classical RNN and state-of-the-art QNN models for sequential learning, and can predict the changing details of temporal sequence data. The practical circuit structure and superior performance indicate that the present QRNN is a promising learning model to find quantum advantageous applications in the near term.
Abstract Modeling temporal dependencies within quantum systems remains a key challenge for quantum machine learning. Current quantum neural networks largely depend on classical recurrent modules, which introduce optimization bottlenecks and coherence loss during sequence processing. To address this, we propose a fully quantum-native recurrent neural network (QRNN) for end-to-end sequential learning. Our architecture captures temporal dynamics through coherent unitary operations, avoiding external classical recurrence and mid-circuit state collapse. The proposed model was benchmarked against a classical recurrent neural network (RNN), quantum tensor networks, and state-of-the-art hybrid QRNN using the Origin Quantum superconducting platform. Experimental evaluations on nonlinear functions, complex dynamical systems, and meteorological datasets demonstrate that our quantum-native QRNN achieves improved prediction accuracy and exhibits enhanced capability in forecasting complex temporal features. For instance, on the relative humidity forecasting task, the proposed QRNN achieves a 73.5% reduction in Root mean square error compared to the hybrid VQRNN. This work establishes a robust framework for preserving coherence in pure quantum sequential processing, offering a scalable path for time-series forecasting on near-term quantum hardware.
Recent developments in quantum computing and machine learning have propelled the interdisciplinary study of quantum machine learning. Sequential modeling is an important task with high scientific and commercial value. Existing VQC or QNN-based methods require significant computational resources to perform the gradient-based optimization of a larger number of quantum circuit parameters. The major drawback is that such quantum gradient calculation requires a large amount of circuit evaluation, posing challenges in current near-term quantum hardware and simulation software. In this work, we approach sequential modeling by applying a reservoir computing (RC) framework to quantum recurrent neural networks (QRNN-RC) that are based on classical RNN, LSTM and GRU. The main idea to this RC approach is that the QRNN with randomly initialized weights is treated as a dynamical system and only the final classical linear layer is trained. Our numerical simulations show that the QRNN-RC can reach results comparable to fully trained QRNN models for several function approximation and time series prediction tasks. Since the QRNN training complexity is significantly reduced, the proposed model trains notably faster. In this work we also compare to corresponding classical RNN-based RC implementations and show that the quantum version learns faster by requiring fewer training epochs in most cases. Our results demonstrate a new possibility to utilize quantum neural network for sequential modeling with greater quantum hardware efficiency, an important design consideration for noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers.
The analysis of historical data allows the execution of predictive tasks such as weather and stock price forecasting. To achieve these goals, Recurrent Neural Networks are implemented in classical computers and, in recent years, quantum methods have also emerged to perform prediction tasks based on the analysis of historical series, which have been called Quantum Recurrent Neural Network (QRNN). The objective of this work is to identify and review the main QRNNs discussed in the literature. A literature search in google scholar resulted in eight relevant papers that were reviewed. In general, the QRNNs show better training accuracy and stability compared to classical methods. It is not possible to speak of a training time advantage with the noisy and low-scale quantum computers currently available.
Recurrent neural networks are the foundation of many sequence-to-sequence models in machine learning, such as machine translation and speech synthesis. In contrast, applied quantum computing is in its infancy. Nevertheless there already exist quantum machine learning models such as variational quantum eigensolvers which have been used successfully e.g. in the context of energy minimization tasks. In this work we construct a quantum recurrent neural network (QRNN) with demonstrable performance on non-trivial tasks such as sequence learning and integer digit classification. The QRNN cell is built from parametrized quantum neurons, which, in conjunction with amplitude amplification, create a nonlinear activation of polynomials of its inputs and cell state, and allow the extraction of a probability distribution over predicted classes at each step. To study the model's performance, we provide an implementation in pytorch, which allows the relatively efficient optimization of parametrized quantum circuits with thousands of parameters. We establish a QRNN training setup by benchmarking optimization hyperparameters, and analyse suitable network topologies for simple memorisation and sequence prediction tasks from Elman's seminal paper (1990) on temporal structure learning. We then proceed to evaluate the QRNN on MNIST classification, both by feeding the QRNN each image pixel-by-pixel; and by utilising modern data augmentation as preprocessing step. Finally, we analyse to what extent the unitary nature of the network counteracts the vanishing gradient problem that plagues many existing quantum classifiers and classical RNNs.
The exploration of quantum advantages with Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) is an exciting endeavor. Recurrent neural networks, the widely used framework in deep learning, suffer from the gradient vanishing and exploding problem, which limits their ability to learn long-term dependencies. To address this challenge, in this work, we develop the sequential model of Quantum Gated Recurrent Neural Networks (QGRNNs). This model naturally integrates the gating mechanism into the framework of the variational ansatz circuit of QNNs, enabling efficient execution on near-term quantum devices. We present rigorous proof that QGRNNs can preserve the gradient norm of long-term interactions throughout the recurrent network, enabling efficient learning of long-term dependencies. Meanwhile, the architectural features of QGRNNs can effectively mitigate the barren plateau phenomenon. The effectiveness of QGRNNs in sequential learning is convincingly demonstrated through various typical tasks, including solving the adding problem, learning gene regulatory networks, and predicting stock prices. The hardware-efficient architecture and superior performance of our QGRNNs indicate their promising potential for finding quantum advantageous applications in the near term.